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With every lithium-sulfur battery I've come across you need to have a lot of steel clamping plates together because they expand so much when charging, and will otherwise delaminate. So ultimately they become the same mass.

This includes the oxis energy battery mentioned here.

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This might sound crazy but is it possible to do that in some way such that the clamping plates etc. are only there during the charging process? Prevent the delamination during charging and then remove the prevention mechanism?

Or just charge really really slowly? Airports etc. could just have terminals full of trickle-charged batteries to swap in and out.

That was my first thought as well. But I don't have a clue if it's practical.

Is there some way to embrace this in the design of the plane? Could the wing structure be built in such a way that an expanding battery actually adds strength?

The idea of making a battery a structural part of an aircraft wing has come up before, e.g. https://newatlas.com/axial-stack-battery-supersonic-electric.... I'm not sure if any progress has been made on this front recently, or whether they've come up against a materials-science roadblock!

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